January 2011

Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago One Hundred Years Ago Seventy-five Years Ago Fifty Years Ago Twenty-five Years Ago

The battle over John Tower’s nomination as Secretary of Defense earlier this year goes down as one of those struggles that whirled trivial and profound issues in the blender of journalism and produced a somewhat mystifying concoction. Was the senator denied confirmation because he was too fond of wine and women? Or was he tainted by coziness with the defense contractors that he would have to oversee? Was he given a fair hearing or drowned in innuendo, leak by leak? Or booby-trapped by an improved but suspiciously new standard of public morality?

The first coin-operated phonograph was installed in San Francisco’s Palais Royale Saloon on November 23, 1889, which makes the jukebox one hundred years old this year. It’s appropriate that the Wurlitzer 1015—seen in all its glory on the opposite page—was produced at about the midpoint of that century. No jukebox before it was as beautiful, and none since has been as popular.

George Washington and I both had a hard time getting to Yorktown. Washington had trouble for the usual reasons: he had to move an unfed, unpaid, unhappy army that was nowhere near large enough for the job at hand. I had trouble for the usual reasons too: the plane, slated to leave for Norfolk at six o’clock, expired on the runway, and I sat over minute, expensive airport drinks until midnight, when a diverted Richmond flight got me there. The Hertz people were still awake in Norfolk, and I made my way over and under the Chesapeake via the Bay Bridge Tunnel and headed for Colonial Williamsburg, where I was staying. Then, incredibly, a mile and a half away from the biggest tourist attraction on the Eastern seaboard, I got lost.

The number for the Virginia Tourism Office is 1-800-248-4833. To reach Colonial Williamsburg, you dial 1-800-HISTORY, and you should do it early as possible because it is busy in the fall. Sol Stember’s splendid The Bicentennial Guide to the American Revolution is out of print but invaluable on this and every other Revolutionary battlefield. Just outside town the Yorktown Victory Center tells the story of the war in imaginative displays and has a year-round encampment laid out according to Baron von Steuben’s regulations. Tim Mulligan’s Virginia: A History & Guide (Random House) is a relaxed, lively, and helpful survey of Yorktown and Williamsburg and, for that matter, the rest of the Old Dominion.

by Gunther Schuller; Oxford; 919 pages .

In a footnote deep in this monumental jazz history, the author remarks that “jazz-writing and criticism, even more than classical music, is a field rampant with hotly contested judgments and acrimonious feuding between writers who have staked out territories they possessively consider their private domains of expertise.” Indeed, the jazz experts have had a field day picking at the strengths and weaknesses of this book. But they all agree that it is a milestone, perhaps the most important single history of jazz yet written, and by an author who seems to stand above the usual battling. Schuller is not only a jazz historian but also a respected jazz player, a prominent orchestral conductor, a noted composer, the longtime head of the New England Conservatory of Music, and a scholar of the music of several centuries. His breadth and depth of knowledge is unmatched and his musicality unquestioned.

The day the world changed

The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor did more than destroy America’s battleship navy; they put an end to an era of American history and blew open a new one. Richard Ketchum’s fascinating survey of what happened on December 7, 1941, begins not in Hawaii but in a sleeping Washington, D.C., and follows the long day as it unfolded for a score of Americans whose lives it would forever change, from college students to President Roosevelt.

The wimp factor

A year ago Americans were watching a presidential campaign in which two perfectly sturdy contenders—one a war hero—had to go through increasingly grotesque postures to show they were tough as hell. When did Americans get the idea that their Chief Executive had to be as macho as John Wayne? Bruce Curtis goes to the historical record and finds that the posturing began at least a century before the Duke was born.

A Connecticut Yankee in hell

In response to the late S. L. A. Marshall’s charge that few World War II infantrymen fired their weapons, I can only answer for my regiment, the 12th Infantry, 4th Division. In the five-and-a-half days that I lasted in the invasion of Normandy, I was with a front-line battalion around thirteen hours a day. And for our regiment his charge is spurious.

In 1960 I wrote this about the D-day battle against German infantry: “Our infantry, kneeling behind hedgerows, firing their weapons to help incoming gliders, looked like Americans at Lexington and Concord.” Soldiers in Normandy responded perfectly because of their training and patriotism.

Fred Clarke, seen here in a commemorative print, led the Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series championship in 1909. Two months later the team’s most faithful fan was born. His memories appear inside.

Before the movie version of Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois opened across the country in 1940, a special White House screening was arranged for Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Sherwood was then acting as speechwriter. The star, Raymond Massey, sat between Roosevelt and Sherwood. After the scene in which Lincoln’s train chugs slowly out of Springfield when he left the town on February 11, 1861 to become president, rolling past his weeping fellow citizens, and, when the lights came on in the room, FDR shook his head and muttered, “… and he wrote all those speeches himself!”